Video picture cuts in half about 5 seconds in to play

[Boomer8]

I have a standalone DVD recorder hooked up to my tv and today I recorded my self playing a bit a of halo 2 on the xbox. I played it back using the dvd recorder and the video is fine I put the dvd-rw with the video on it in my dvd burner that is in pc. I used dvd decrypter to decrypt teh files to my hard drive. I then used power dvd to view the files and they played fine. So i opened them with virtual dub mod and went preview input and after about 5-10 seconds the video just cuts in half even with the ffdshow filter loaded. I also tried using winmpg (another video convertor) and it convert the mpeg into a 5mb video file and 1.7 mb mp3 file. when I play just the video file (after being converted with winmpg) it also cuts the video in half about 5 seconds into play. I have unitnsllaed divx, and xvid codecs and re-installed them but it continues to give me this problem any help is appreciated.

[Boomer8]

No one can help me out?

[gonzalimator]

It almost sounds like the video was recorded in half D1 resolution. You know, 352x480. If the picture is cut in half vertically, meaning it's tall and skinny, then that probably the problem. I would check to see if the DVD recorder has any quality settings for recording. If the quality is set to low, it's probably using a lower bitrate and half D1 resolution. This would explain why it looks normal in PowerDVD because the software adjusts the picture according to the DAR (Display Aspect Ratio) and stretches it horizontally so that it looks normal.

Just a theory.

[Boomer8]

Just a theory.

and a damn good one. I just remembered I first started off recording in low quality after about 10 seconds I stopped, because it didn't look good. So I changed the quality to SP (normal) and thats where my problem began. How do I take the dvd files apart from each other I have 3 different videos on the disc (recorded 3 different times) but I only have two vob files and when I click on them it uses both video files, also when I open the files in Vdubmod it uses the low qaulity resolution and I cannot find where I can change the resolution. and I'm afraid if I cut out the first part of the movie with vdub the second half will be messed.

[gonzalimator]

There may be a better way to do this, but this will work.

Load your files into VirtualDubMod as you did before.
Select the range of frames that you wish to keep.
Use a resize filter in Vdub and resize the horizontal resolution.
Encode your AVI or frameserve to your mpeg encoder.

That's it in a nutshell. I'm sure there's some guides on editing and using filters with VirtualDub if you're unsure of what I'm talking about.

I'm not exactly sure how to extract chunks or edit the VOB files. I would check to see if there is any software out there that can analyze the VOBs and tell what the resolution is. It may all be recorded at half D1 and may not be "fixable". Not really sure what else to say because I'm unfamiliar with that stuff.

Hope that helps.

[Boomer8]

That sounds like it would have worked but it didn't When I resized it all it did was stretch the video rather then resizing bounding box, guess I'll just delete the files and record again but this time only using one resolution rather then 2.